


Family, Found

by emrisemrisemris



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/F, Hannah Shepard (offscreen), Illusive Man (offscreen), ME2, and their issues, normandy crew - Freeform, spacer shepard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 15:35:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12684765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emrisemrisemris/pseuds/emrisemrisemris
Summary: “There are,” Shepard announced after some time had passed, “enough family issues on this ship to keep a crew of therapists in work for years."





	Family, Found

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [on Tumblr](https://emrisemrisemris.tumblr.com/post/164837370318/theres-still-90-minutes-of-the-31st-left-where) in response to the August #meflashfanwork theme, "Family".

Miranda Lawson was the only person in the mess when Shepard came in, seated at one end of the long table with her omnitool out, a stack of datapads spread out around her and an empty cup of coffee.

It was almost two in the morning, shiptime, but Shepard had gotten used to finding her Cerberus XO taking advantage of the time to spread out in a bigger space. That, and, as Lawson had explained the previous time, she'd been going in and out of her office to the coffee machine so often it saved a measurable amount of time just to work in the common area.

Shepard collected a cup of horrible ship coffee for herself, and took the seat at the table furthest from the other woman.

Miranda ignored her.

She drank the coffee.

"There are," Shepard announced after some time had passed, "enough family issues on this ship to keep a crew of therapists in work for years. Maybe I should ask Kelly to form a support group."

"Shepard, was that directed at me?"

"No. But also yes." The Commander put her cup down and stared at it, as if sufficient application of biotics would fill it back up. "You've got a deranged billionaire for a father with an obsession with his legacy. Garrus can't decide whether he wants to be everything his father was or the complete opposite. Thane kinda abandoned his kid to go on a revenge quest, Samara put two of hers in an institution and the other one's a serial killer, Grunt is … you, but built by a krogan mad scientist, the less said about Jacob's dad the better, and it's a miracle Jack's even alive." The cup remained, stubbornly, empty. "You know even Zaeed has a kid out there somewhere? The only one with a half-healthy family life is Tali, right up until she got herself exiled to cover up her dad being a traitor -"

"You've forgotten the Professor," Miranda said, shutting off her omni-tool and shuffling her datapads into a neat stack. She put one hand over the other and gave Shepard the look of an indulgent parent waiting for a child to calm down.

"Salarian families are more like business mergers anyway," Shepard said, and then added grudgingly "OK, I'll give you Mordin. He writes home to his nephew. OK. One out of -"

"And Dr Chakwas."

Shepard blinked. "Chakwas has a family?"

"Three sisters, eight nieces. And she writes birthday cards to all her old doctoral students." Miranda tapped her fingers on the table, thinking. "Joker's father and sister live on Tiptree. Gabby Daniels has a little girl. Donnelly has an identical twin -"

Shepard groaned and put her forehead on the table.

"- which is a horrifying thought, but there you are."

"Point stands," Shepard said into the table. "This ship is full of family mess, and -"

"And of course your relationship with your mother is enviably functional," Miranda said.

"Don't even _have_ a dad and I'm still doing better than half the crew," Shepard muttered.

"I noticed the gap on your records," Miranda said. "I did wonder if you were medically conceived as well."

"No. Good old-fashioned one-night stand." Shepard lifted her head far enough to put it in her hands. "Mom was still a private, I was an accident, _he_ was a corporate mercenary called Jack. She never saw him again. Why am I even telling you this?"

"It's two in the morning and somebody's just told you their harrowing life story," Miranda said, and steepled her fingers. "And you've pulled three consecutive eighteen-hour days. You're drunk on sleep deprivation. Go to bed."

"You don't get to give me orders, Lawson," Shepard mumbled, but there was no heart in it.

" _Bed,_ Commander," Miranda said sternly.

Shepard muttered something into her own palms.

"Sorry?"

"I said, yours is closer," Shepard said, barely audibly.

There was a pause, during which Shepard looked determinedly at the table and Miranda at the ceiling.

"Be my guest," Miranda said eventually. "EDI, open my office door, would you?"

The door slid back. Without looking Miranda in the eye, Shepard got to her feet and headed for the door of Miranda's office at the pace of a zombie. Shortly afterwards there was the sound of someone falling into bed fully armoured, and the door closed again.

Miranda shook her head, and pulled a datapad towards her more or less at random.

_He was a corporate mercenary called Jack …_

There were millions of human mercenaries and it was a common name, and also people lied, and yet …

Miranda pulled up the Commander's formal Alliance headshot on her omni-tool, and examined the lines of the woman's face with newly unsettled eyes. Shepard had started greying early, her temples already whitening before she'd even made N7; subsequent events hadn't helped. Piercing blue-grey eyes, and a set to her face that made her look permanently slightly unimpressed, until it was lit up with one of those smiles.

"EDI, can I get into the Cerberus core database from my omni-tool?"

"Connecting," said EDI. A few moments later the omni-tool's projection began to fill with the familiar interface of Cerberus' huge internal filesystem.

There was information filed away in there that could ruin lives and bring down governments. It was a spy's dream; a treasure trove, a whole cursed tomb's worth of little threads and dirty secrets.

It was a normal reference database as well, hooked up to the email system and the holiday calendar and all the other things that an organisation two hundred strong spread across the galaxy needed to co-ordinate. The birthday announcements. The classifieds thread for agents trying to sell second-hand aircars or dusty exercise equipment.

Shepard tended to forget that Cerberus was, in many respects, just a company.

It also provided an assortment of working logins for other databases spread across the galaxy. They hadn't managed to get one for the Citadel Archives yet; those were jealously guarded and stored a great deal of their information in physical form only, which was frustrating. Alliance service records, however …

Miranda reviewed Captain Hannah Shepard's service history and counted backwards to the Commander's birthdate - three years before the First Contact war - and then nine months backward from there to the summer of 2153, before Cerberus had even been thought of. She'd had some leave on Earth.

She closed the record, and went into the Cerberus medical database instead.

There was this to be said for the Illusive Man: he'd _been_ a field agent and knew the drill, and still, on occasion, would suit up ready to get his hands dirty if an operation demanded his particular skills. He liked to know every detail of what his projects were producing, and had an open inbox for any operative who wanted to speak directly to the man in charge. He drew no salary. And when they'd instituted the company-wide medical records database, to help support the medical division - Cerberus' corporate health offering outstripped anything offered by any human state system; it was one of the reasons colonists, especially, tended to join - he'd put his own results in there as well.

Under a pseudonym, of course, he'd said, in case a disgruntled employee tried to Reveal The Identity Of The Illusive Man. But they were in there. He was confident the Cerberus medical scan was the best available; why not take advantage of it?

Miranda found Shepard's medical record - screens upon screens of it, months of her own notes on the Lazarus Project - pulled out the genetic scan, and told EDI to cross-check it against the rest of the Cerberus genetics database.

She made herself a coffee while the AI worked.

Then another.

Then another.

Garrus emerged from the battery in his undersuit, went to the fridge for a dextro snack bar, waved vaguely at her and went back to his lair. He had a hammock down the side of one of the main cannons, which was against at least six shipboard safety recommendations, but the regulations hadn't been written with turians in mind and had definitely not been expecting Garrus.

Miranda decided against further coffee, and had a glass of water instead.

"I have found a positive result," EDI said.

"Show me," said Miranda.

And there it was. She searched the pseudonym, and found a human veteran, a biotic soldier who'd died in the First Contact War. Made sense. He tended to prefer meaningful aliases, when he needed them.

"What do you intend to do with this information?" EDI enquired.

Miranda stared at the few lines of code.

_Don't even_ have _a dad and I'm still doing better than half the crew,_

"Nothing," Miranda said eventually. "It was for … my own personal curiosity. Delete the last hour of my search history, please, EDI."

"Done."

"Override command: delete the last hour of your own non-routine processing records, on my mark," Miranda said.

"I do not see the necessity of -" EDI began.

"Mark."

The mess room was silent. Miranda contemplated the table, and then collected the stack of datapads in the crook of her left arm and went back to her office.

Shepard was crumpled on the left side of the bed, in full armour, dead to the world. Miranda put the stack down as quietly as she could, took off her boots, changed into pyjamas, brushed her teeth.

Shepard woke up when she was brushing her hair.

"M'randa? You're still up?"

"Not for much longer."

"The hell's so important you're working on it this late?"

Miranda looked across the dim room at her, at the drowsy blue eyes and prematurely silver hair, and shook her head. "Nothing much."

  
  
  



End file.
